Blue Bottle Coffee, a Bay Area-transplant, is making quite the splash with a new roaster/caf on Berry Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.George Hobica

FROM Midtown Manhattan, it only takes 20 minutes or so by car to get to Gravesend. For the return trip, you probably want to figure on four hours or so.

That is, if Lenny Kern gets his hooks into you.

Kern, a gregarious individual given to eating plenty of his own cooking, is the guy in charge of the kitchen at L&B Spumoni Gardens, one of the best reasons to visit Gravesend, a remote section of Brooklyn that most New Yorkers would need a map to find. L&B, sitting on a windy stretch of 86th Street, is a pizzeria, restaurant, ice cream parlor and outdoor café all rolled into one; a place for monster Sicilian pies and big helpings of spumoni; a boisterous and colorful temple to old school Italian-American cooking and culture.

It was for the Sicilian pie that three of us city people wandered into L&B on a frigid weekday evening not long ago. We wanted big, fat slices of that famous pizza, almost focaccia-like in its simplicity. We wanted no line, no wait, no bloggers giving real-time updates from their iPhones. Most of all, we wanted no out-of-towners.

As anyone around these parts knows, a tourist-free New York is a tough call. As a resident of Midtown, I’m used to feeling a little bit like a character in a Macy’s window even in July. Never mind when Macy’s windows are actually all decked out for the holidays and the attendant crowds pour into town. With the Christmas crush at peak levels, I found myself wishing for a little peace and quiet. A little simplicity. Which is how I ended up in Gravesend, which is how we got to Lenny Kern (who stopped at our table as he made the rounds through the dining room to pitch that night’s specials personally), which is how we ended up trying the delicate turkey meatballs, served with pasta in a basil and onion cream sauce.

Apparently, ordering the meatballs — a steal at $12 for a dish that would serve three people with normal appetites — was some sort of secret signal. Before we knew it, we were being entreated to try items from that night’s special tasting menu, available for $40-$60 per person and customizable to each table, taste-wise and price-wise. This sounded just fine to us, and throughout the course of the evening, we ended up sampling perfect artichokes, served in a garlic and lemon sauce. There were oysters oreganata, a dessert plate the size of Delaware — a young couple at the table next to ours had gone down the same dangerous road and, at one point, simply up and fled, powerless against the wishes of the kitchen but unable to eat another bite.

Run — save yourselves, we urged. We’re too old.

On the way home, we drove through Dyker Heights to check out the world-famous light display. It was the first visit for everyone in the car and a fitting end to the evening, which had been all about departing from New York As Usual. And while one visit every few months or so to L&B is about all any normal human could take, I didn’t wait months to return to Brooklyn.

With a bunch of vacation days demanding to be used up before year’s end, I spent much of the rest of the week exploring the city just across the river. The Transit Museum was outstanding, the Norman Rockwell exhibit now up at the Brooklyn Museum well-worth the journey, and it was great just scouting around random neighborhoods like Ditmas Park, looking at houses I might like to purchase, if I could ever pull together a family large enough to fill those beautiful behemoths. But, as a former denizen of Park Slope — way back before it or just about anywhere else in the borough became terribly fashionable — what was most gratifying, perhaps, was to see just how cool Brooklyn had become.

In the past decade, New York City as a whole has matured considerably, and perhaps nowhere is the change more obvious than in Brooklyn which, not long ago, used to be one of America’s biggest backwaters. Now it defines the concept of conscious living and / or seemingly effortless awesomeness. Once a place people couldn’t escape fast enough, today it’s a place people are dying to get to. The old-school neighborhoods and their hangouts are still very much alive, but there’s so much worthy new-school stuff, it’s hard to know where to look first. From top-notch — and very expensive — restaurants in formerly comatose Carroll Gardens, to the minimal-but-cozy Blue Bottle roaster-café (one of many West Coast transplants aiding the Brooklyn revolution, it must be mentioned) livening up dreary Berry Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is so unbelievably transformed, those who haven’t spent much time east of the East River in recent years (maybe in the past four years) will barely recognize certain sections.

Simply, it’s like having a whole new city right next door — a city far more fascinating to explore than many others on the East Coast that we won’t embarrass by calling out here. So save yourself the hassle of a bus ride to Boston or Philadelphia. (Ed: Wait, I thought we weren’t naming names.) Next time you’re looking for a quick getaway, just cross the East River. And while Brooklyn’s must-sees/eats/drinks could now easily fill a book (we’ll take our “New York Post Loves Brooklyn Day in Brooklyn” proclamation now, Marty Markowitz), this is a tabloid newspaper, and this story has already gone on way too long.

So here, just a few essential stops that’ll get you off on the right foot.

1) Fort Defiance Red Hook

What is perhaps most alluring about today’s Brooklyn is that its most civilized hangouts are some of the most laidback and relaxed. You could bring your visiting grandmother and her loud-talking, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing gentleman friend to this all-day café/bar on Van Brunt Street and you’d all be welcomed like old pals (provided you don’t come during weekend brunch, when everyone else does). Part New Orleans drinking den, part Chicago corner joint with a menu that reads like something out of Savannah (try the pimento cheese), a trip to Fort Defiance, just minutes from Wall Street via the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, is a world away from just about everything that comprises New York as most people know it. On a chilly day, their painstakingly-constructed Irish coffees are one of the best legal pick-me-ups in town.

Get there365 Van Brunt St. / B62 from Borough Hall

2) Prime Meats Carroll Gardens

Some people call it one of the best restaurants in town, and that may be — it certainly serves one of New York’s best steaks. Its côte de boeuf, reasonably priced by the ounce and meant for sharing, is cheaper and better than anything we’ve ever had at Peter Luger, not to mention the scores of bad Manhattan steakhouses that are somehow allowed to live despite being terrible. But Prime Meats isn’t just about steak, though with steak like theirs, that would be enough. It is also about maintaining one of the most likeable dining rooms in town — a retro-chic kind of place that looks like a better-kept, more style-conscious version of that old German restaurant your parents used to drag you to back in the day, back before the neighborhood changed and the whole thing went teats up. The menu is very farm-to-table-ish and there are very few items not worth ordering. Start things off right with a tankard of New York City’s best beer (that would be anything from Red Hook’s Sixpoint Brewery), a plate or two of the cured landjager sausage and some house-made soft pretzels with mustard. No reservations — however, they do now take credit cards.

Get there465 Court St. / F to Carroll St.

3) Iris Café Brooklyn Heights

Tucked away mid-block in a beyond-charming pocket of already disgustingly-beautiful Brooklyn Heights, this smarter-than-smart coffee bar / grocer is the sort of place that can really make you hate your neighborhood, providing you don’t already live down here. An ideal place to disappear to when you’re finished with life on the map, you come here for Stumptown coffee and great baked goods (gingerbread with lemon curd) and maybe take home some organic eggs, or whatever, for tomorrow’s breakfast. Don’t bring your laptop — they’re not allowed. At all. About damn time somebody stood up for what’s right.

Get there20 Columbia Pl. / 2, 3, 4, 5, M, R, W to Court-Borough Hall

4) Saraghina Bedford-Stuyvesant

Of all the changes that have come to Brooklyn in recent years, the idea of Bed-Stuy becoming a trendwad-magnet could be filed under L for Least Probable. Not that it hasn’t been cool for years, because it has. The Akwaaba Mansion has long been one of the city’s most perfect bed and breakfasts as its owners have spent years cultivating an upscale business district on Lewis Avenue; one that’s finally moving into its own. But all that stuff was always kind of grown-up. Not so Saraghina — a brick-oven pizzeria and all-day café that opened not long ago up on the decidedly unwashed corner of Halsey Street. How the assemblage of dazed Italian hipsters that seem to run this place (and we use the term “run” loosely) landed in the middle of Bed-Stuy is unclear. What is clear is that it is excellent. The place smells like basil and espresso, the décor is Brooklyn Frontier — rustic, but carefully so. The pies are decent, but it’s not the food, really, that draws us here. It’s the experience of wasting an afternoon in their sunny little café or, weather permitting, on the ramshackle back patio while everyone else is chained to their desks elsewhere in the city.

Get there435 Halsey St. / C to Kingston-Throop

5) Blue Bottle Williamsburg

The go-to for expertly-done espresso drinks (and extra helpings of coffee fanaticism) in the San Francisco Bay Area has now become the same for lucky residents of Williamsburg. This spacious and minimal yet warm and welcoming roaster/café on Berry Street is Brooklyn 2.0 at its finest. Honestly, we love Stumptown more. But Stumptown doesn’t have a café like this; that sliver of space near Herald Square doesn’t hold a candle to this self-contained universe of happy for caffeine freaks. Order your one-cup-at-a-time drip coffee, then watch them roasting beans in the back while you wait. Make sure to buy a half-pound to go. Also make sure to ask them if they have any plans to stop nurse-maiding their customers who don’t really need lectures about freshness and rather just want a damn whole pound of beans. Come to think of it, there’s another reason why coming here is awesome: It reminds us of why we don’t live in tragicomically self-serious places like San Francisco. Useful!

Get there160 Berry St. / L to Bedford Avenue

For more information about Brooklyn tours, attractions, hotels and more, check out visitbrooklyn.org.